Introduction

"Love, and do what you will!" So runs the famous phrase coined by Augustine.4 If one were to take the wording of this instruction at face value, then one would assume that everything in our world is subject to norms - except love. Love seems to be its own norm. If that is the case, then what can ethics add to this? Perhaps it would be helpful to approach the issue in this way: the subject of ethics is not love itself, but rather the concrete forms in which love is expressed. That said, the word 'love' - which seems so familiar to us - is actually extremely ambiguous and has been deployed in very different ways. For this reason, the following text will explore this diversity and consider issues such as whether certain forms of love are genuine, while others are merely apparent; if this proves to be the case, then we will seek to identify the norms according to which such a distinction can be made.

In fact, when it comes to love, people have always established boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Not everything that goes by the name of love is recognized as such. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe provides a literary example of establishing norms not with regard to love itself, but rather with regard to a certain expression of love, one which society - or in this case, the families involved - does not accept. Any discourse on love must therefore consider the time period and the society in which such inclusions and exclusions take place: What can permissibly be identified as love, in which society and at which time - and what cannot? More significantly: Why can a certain phenomenon be called love at one time and not at another? And finally: Who determines what can be considered love? Who but the lovers themselves can or should decide what love means for them? Why should any other authority want or be given the power to regulate this?

In the light of these questions, the task of ethics is to speak to what is included and, above all, to what is excluded. Ethics must interpret, explain, and - where possible - justify the moral norms that accompany the various forms of love. The subject of our considerations should be which forms of love are socially acceptable and which are not, especially once we realize that the norms governing love have changed over the course of history. My aim is therefore to trace these changes - on the one hand in order to understand the multiple conditionality of such a 'natural' phenomenon as love appears to be, and on the other to arrive at a viable and understandable ethics of love for the present moment, under the conditions that characterize society today. Love thus reveals itself as a force caught between the "naked body" and "social law," as Giorgio Agamben puts it.5 Previously Voltaire also focused his attention on the point where body becomes mind, where drive and desire become reason, where nature becomes culture. According to Voltaire, love is the embroidered text of culture against the background of nature.6 Since people have received the gift of perfecting everything nature gives us, he argues, they have also perfected love. The texture of society is understood as culture cultivating the substrate of nature. In this sense, love is not the free gift of nature, but rather is inscribed in human action through instances of speaking and writing, reading and translating, explaining and justifying.7 Therefore we must consider whether a culture of love that relates to the nature of love in so many different ways can truly be described as a human universal.

We determine what qualifies as love by talking and writing about the topic. Love is not a feeling, a drive, or a desire, but a discourse - it is an order of speaking and writing, controlled by license and taboo. This discourse produces that of which it speaks. We can unpack the paradox - the fact that love, the most private of all things, occurs only in the space of public discourse - but we cannot overcome it. The conviction that orders of speech and writing do not simply reflect social reality, but rather create it (although they are themselves part of that social reality) prevents an overly simplistic view of the matter, according to which these orders merely interpret a social reality retrospectively and have no role in producing it. The texture of society shapes the text through which it communicates, and vice versa. This is why the social fabric constitutes much more than simply a historical context, and also why a given historical reality can only be understood by means of text, and is thus subject to interpretation.8 If one subscribes to this view, then there is no (longer any) ontology that would allow us to speak of the essence of love. At most, what we have is an ontology that provides information about which descriptions of love a society has made available to individuals so that they can understand themselves as lovers, which functions these descriptions fulfill in a given society, and how these descriptions change as their functions change.

In methodological terms, therefore, we must distinguish between an epistemic and an ontological approach to the concept of love.9 An epistemic point of view is guided by the idea that an individual selectively relates to the reality we reference when we use the term 'love' - that is, the individual assembles a concept of love and uses this concept to distinguish a certain reality from other conceptual determinations of reality. Thus it is not about the nature of the object 'love' (traditionally speaking: the essence of love), but rather about the linguistic reference to that which is called 'love.' This also means that the use of concepts is linguistically constrained: an individual who puts the concept of love to use is by no means acting arbitrarily, but always within the medium of language, which is collectively organized. An ontological point of view comes into play when we speak of the concept of love, in the sense that we are entitled to designate a certain reality in this way (as 'love') and not otherwise - that is, we claim that different linguistic determinations of reality are related to each other in an ontologically meaningful way. This occurs when we can specify criteria that allow us to speak of love and thus also to exclude other objects from this linguistic usage. These criteria refer to specifiable properties, things we can describe and verify. By approaching the epistemic function of concepts as ontologically grounded, we are pursuing an understanding of love that is partly realist and partly constructivist: the semantics of love adheres to the requirements of a social structure, which are determined by place and time. The language that steers the individual use of the concept of love cannot be conceived independently of the social context.

In the following chapters, the description of the context in which love is talked and written about precedes the presentation of the text itself. One could also proceed in the reverse order, because no direction of this reciprocal relationship should be privileged: a change in social structure may give rise to a new concept of love, and conversely, innovative semantics may stimulate the further development of a corresponding social structure. I intend to show that each level - context and text - has a history, and that this development can best be described as a covariation in social structure and semantics.10 Both variables prove to be contingent. In other words, the presupposition - which must nevertheless be historically validated or historicized on a case-by-case basis - is that both semantics and social structure are variable, or better: covariable. In this approach, the social structure has a hermeneutic function: the interpretation of a text is dependent on an understanding of its context. In this way, interpretations are shown to be more or less plausible, and common interpretations may be exposed as one-sided or even false - as we will see when we consider the friendship model of love or the marriage model of love, each of which emerged to serve a specific social function. Only by linking text and context can we understand why love appears as a habitus in the works of Aristotle and as a moral obligation in those of Thomas Aquinas. In terms of semantics, we can establish that certain models are more or less useful for contemporary society. I will also show that models of love employed in segmented or stratified societies cannot be easily transferred to modern, functionally differentiated societies.11 This may give readers the impression that I have abandoned a descriptive approach in favor of a prescriptive one, and therefore that I have investigated the forms of love with an eye to the appropriate norms. Yet it is possible to describe a certain model of love as appropriate or inappropriate for a particular society without making prescriptive statements (although of course such descriptions may contain prescriptive implications, and the justifications for these must then be examined in each case). Where prescriptive content is explicitly referenced, the norms for the appropriate forms must be identified and justified, and the problem is then to find suitable criteria for this.

In this way, we can avert the danger of adopting existing categories (whether provided by traditions of speaking and...